Customer Engagement: The Marketing Funnel

Customer Engagement: The Customer JourneyIn our previous Blog Post we explained the concept of the Buyer Persona which in short is your Ideal Customer. By now you should have a picture in your mind of who your Ideal Customer is. The next step is to understand the journey your customer or client undertakes to engage your services or to make a purchase from your online shop for the first time. Understanding this process (or what one calls the “Marketing Funnel”) can help you make critical sales and marketing decisions that will take your Company forward.What is a Marketing Funnel?Unbounce has the perfect definition for what exactly the Marketing Funnel is: “A model describing the various stages of a prospect’s journey from the first interaction with your brand to the ultimate goal: conversion. Conversion rate optimization is about moving people through your marketing funnel, turning them from prospects into raving, repeat customers.”

By understanding what your Buyer Persona wants to accomplish, and by understanding the Journey (s)he undertakes to obtain what (s)he is interested in, you can create the kind of content on your own website that will help him/her to achieve his/her own goals. If they get the answers to their questions or the means to achieve their goals on your website, they will remain as existing customers and may even refer new customers to your website.

What are the Components of a Marketing Funnel?

Above is an illustrated example of the Marketing Funnel.

Wikipedia summarizes the staged process which clients/customers go through before they acquire a service or purchase a product as follow:

“Awareness – the customer is aware of the existence of a product or service

Interest – actively expressing an interest in a product group

Desire – aspiring to a particular brand or product

Action – taking the next step towards purchasing the chosen product”

How to Use the Information of your Marketing Funnel?

With your Buyer Persona(s) in mind and by understanding their Customer Journey you can create the ideal Digital Marketing Strategy for your business with the right “type” of content aimed at every stage of the Marketing Funnel. The ultimate goal is obviously to guide as many as possible customers to the “action” stage which is where they will engage your services or purchase your products. Your Content will depend on your Strategy which you will devise to accomplish your goals. Digital Marketing will be addressed in the next instalment, but to give you a taste, the main areas of Digital Marketing are:

Website Design and Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

E-mail Marketing

Blogging

Pay-per-click (Google AdWords)

Social Media Optimisation and Marketing

Video Marketing

In Conclusion

As stated in the previous instalment, if you want to grow your Business, you can only do that with an effective Digital Marketing Strategy. You have now as a first step created your Ideal Customer (Buyer Persona). You also understand what journey they will normally undertake to achieve their goals. Now you can start with the first step in your Strategy to engage and guide them to make a purchasing decision. This first step is to create the correct type of content (considering the above areas of Digital Marketing) for each stage of the Marketing Funnel. Watch out for the next instalment where we will cover these areas of Digital Marketing in more detail and which will assist you with the finalisation of your Digital Marketing Strategy.

Through this process you will be able reach your customers online and effectively engage them. Properly engaged Customers are happy customers and a happy customer grows the reputation of your business and brings in that all important new business.

Contact Us for more Information and for our assistance to grow your own Customer Base.

Website Maintenance

Website maintenance is important to any business, regardless of size. Your website is a worldwide window into your business and it can have a big impact on how the value of your product or service is perceived. All businesses need regular website maintenance to attract and retain customers, maintain search engine rankings and present new information, products and services to the public.

According to Cybervise, “If you are running an online store, website maintenance is equivalent to running a retail store. Product inventory, pricing, shipping all have to be maintained on a frequent basis. We recommend that online stores should perform maintenance at least on a weekly basis. Any delay in updates can instantly cost a business money, so plan for help before you find yourself in a crisis.”

Every website has to perform maintenance at some point or another. Whether it’s just to upgrade a portion of the site or because of some problem with the site, it’s an inevitable fact of website ownership.

According to B2C, there are five critical reasons why you should sign up for regular website maintenance with a web design agency.

“Keep Your Website Secure - A Forbes report from two years ago stated that every day 30,000 websites are hacked. This can easily be avoided by having a company handle your website maintenance — or by doing your updates in-house.

Improve User Experience - If your website isn’t user-friendly, why have a website at all? Updates to the software powering your website not only deals with security fixes but also add more useful features + make your website run smoother

Grow Your Website Traffic - If you launch your new website and never update it, why would an existing client/prospect come back to view it? Updating your website on a regular basis gives users a reason to come back!

Save Money - You may not have considered it, but paying an affordable monthly rate for website maintenance can save you a lot of money in the long run. What if your website is hacked, or if something else goes wrong and your website goes offline? This not only makes you and your company look bad but it could also be costly to fix. It’s a much better approach to be proactive in doing all of your normal website maintenance / updates.”

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the practice of increasing the quantity and quality of traffic to your website through organic search engine results. SEO is the process of getting traffic from the “free,” “organic,” “editorial” or “natural” search results on search engines such as Google, Bing and Yahoo. Properly applied, search engine optimization allows your site to not only be seen by the search engines but, when a search term (either keywords or phrases) is entered, offers the ability to rank very high in the search engine results pages.

According to an article published in The Entrepreneur, SEO is one of the most powerful online marketing mediums there is, and it's critical to the success of your online business. The bottom line is, SEO done right can enable you to be found and ranked well in the sea of billions of existing web pages, and your visitors and your bank account will both love you for it.

It is not going to stop working any time soon – Based on the way search engines appear to be developing, it is not likely that SEO will cease to be effective any time in the foreseeable future.

It is cost-effective – Compared to the costs associated with other forms of online marketing such as PPC advertising, social media marketing, or purchasing leads for an email marketing program, SEO provides fairly good ROI.

Search engines grabbing more market share – Somewhere between 80-90% of customers now check online reviews prior to making a purchase, and this number is only expected to increase. It won’t be long before virtually everyone is searching for products and services online. Do you want them to be able to locate your business, or not? Without organic SEO in place, people will have a very hard time finding you and will instead find your competitors.

Rise of mobile bandwidth and local search optimization – Later this year, the amount of traffic delivered to mobile devices is expected to exceed that delivered to traditional desktop devices. With this dramatic explosion in mobile usage, a whole new world of effective SEO techniques have opened up for companies, such as local search optimization.

Not having a healthy content profile is damaging – With each and every update to its search algorithm, Google and other engines change the way they look at websites.

Your competitors are doing it – “If you’re not moving forward and improving your position, you’re losing ground to a competitor who is. That’s a simple fact of how the process works.” Don’t let your competitors out manoeuvre you by ignoring this valuable tool for your business.”

E-Commerce Website

e-Commerce, also known as e-Business, or electronic business, is simply the sale and purchase of services and goods over and electronic medium, like the Internet. It also involves electronically transferring data and funds between two or more parties. Simply put, it is online shopping as we commonly know it.

According to an article published by Huffington Post, when it comes to successfully running your online business the ecommerce software that your website is built on can either be a supportive ally or a tormenting obstacle. If you make the wrong choice it can make the whole experience incredibly frustrating.

WooCommerce for example, is an excellent choice for Wordpress Users. According to IThemes, “From ease of use to SEO, control over inventory to mobile readiness, WooCommerce is the clear choice for your WordPress e-commerce site “

There are different types of e-Commerce websites. The most common type is retail selling, but there are many others too, like auction websites, business-to-business services, music portals, consultancy websites, finance management websites, and the like. WebScripto can help you create the perfect e-commerce website on any of these subjects.

Content Writing

Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action. Forbes succinctly put it: “Content marketing taps into the first two stages of the buying process by raising awareness of solutions and educating consumers about a product they may have never considered before.”

According to the Content Marketing Institute, regardless of what type of marketing tactics you use, content marketing should be part of your process, not something separate. Quality content is part of all forms of marketing:

Content strategy: Content strategy is part of most content marketing strategies.

There are a number of different types of Content Marketing, but what WebScripto wants to stress is the importance of Content Writing. Who wants to read a piece of content riddled with grammar and spelling mistakes, or where the point of the story is not clearly illustrated? Nobody. You will lose your customer within seconds after s/he has started to read about your product or advice.

According to an article published by the Huffington Post, “by creating a good content strategy, you will have the unique opportunity to offer meaning to your content and make it fulfil your business goal. The content will be branded, and it will be offering you a better exposure in the online world.”

Content that is well-researched and well-written by an experienced and skilled Content Writer is therefore crucial, not only to the products or services you are attempting to sell, but to your brand as a whole.

Content writers are professional writers who produce engaging content for use online. They're Internet-savvy individuals who create articles, blog posts, and other forms of written Web material.

Another important factor is to keep up a Blog that keeps your customer focused on your website and products. Google also attaches importance to the relevance of your content and whether or not you are consistently updating your website to keep it relevant and informative.

Graphic Design

There are no shortcuts for professional graphic design. Whether it's a logo, business card, or website, bad design drives away business. Design that’s to be experienced in an instant is the easiest to recognize. Designers arrange type, form, and image on posters, advertisements, packages, and other printed matter, as well as information visualizations and graphics for newspapers and magazines.

According to The Balance, graphic design can serve many functions, and to that end, it wears many hats. Just a few of the uses of graphic design include:

Logo Design

Signage

Corporate identity/ Branding

Printed materials (books, flyers, magazines, newspapers)

Online (banners, blogs, websites, etc)

Album covers

Greeting cards

Howdesign has identified 6 reasons why professional design is necessary:

First impressions matter.

Design can tell a story.

Branding makes a company memorable.

Creativity can be a differentiator.

Good design converts.

Spending more up-front saves time and money in the long run.

WebScripto can help your business with the memorable designs you need to make your brand stand out from your competitors. Contact us now for a free no-obligation quote.

Product Photography

Product photography is a branch of commercial photography which is about accurately but attractively representing a product. The principal application of product photography is in product catalogues and brochures, with a proportion of product images also being used in advertising. Commercial photography is photography which is shot for a commercial purpose, typically for use in commercial offset litho printing or in advertising. Commercial photography generally has the end purpose of selling a product or service.

We all know that human beings are visual by nature. A single snapshot of a product can provide more relevant information about the product’s quality than paragraphs of text.

Good quality product images are key to selling your products online, often we forget that the customer has not seen the products we are selling. Product images are a representation of the physical product that the customer will receive.

Let’s put some statistics behind our contention. The Industrial Marketer made a very good summation in this regard:

Articles with relevant images average 94% more total views than articles without images.

A press release with photos gets nearly 15% more online views than a text-only press release.

60% of consumers who use online search say they prefer to contact a business whose listing includes an image.

Nearly 70% of e-commerce website shoppers say the product image is very important when making their purchase decision.

Digital Marketing:

Digital marketing is an umbrella term for all of your online marketing efforts. Businesses leverage digital channels such as Google search, social media, email, and their websites to connect with their current and prospective customers. WebScripto is firmly of the view that no matter what kind of business you have, digital marketing methods and techniques can help you reach and expand your customer base.

According to Wikipedia, “in an ever more complex retail environment, customer engagement is essential but challenging. Retailers must shift from a linear marketing approach of one-way communication to a value exchange model of mutual dialogue and benefit-sharing between provider and consumer. The spread of information and awareness can occur across numerous channels, such as the blogosphere, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Pinterest, and a variety of other platforms. Online communities and social networks allow individuals to easily create content and publicly publish their opinions, experiences, and thoughts and feelings about many topics and products.”

Let us put some statistics behind the growing Digital Stratosphere and the importance of Digital Marketing in this environment. The Nielsen Company investigated and found the following: “The online retail ecosystem is fast evolving, and increasingly, shoppers no longer simply go to the nearest store. Rather, they grab the nearest digital device. And with the world at our fingertips, why only shop domestically? In fact, digital analytics firm e-Marketer projects that online retail sales will more than double between 2015 and 2019 and account for more than 12% of global sales by 2019. Retail therapy is giving way to e-tail therapy.”

WebScripto agrees with Forbes that, “the key to keeping up with the technological revolution is to fully embrace it, understand its potential and figure out how to properly integrate it into your larger strategy”.